By cutting, do you mean over the air local TV and everything else via Internet streams?
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Media Companies Are Ready to Sell. Does Anyone Want to Buy?
- Thread starter davideduardo
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Yep. I'm putting my faith in FireTV.
I used it at work at KFBK (the only way to get TV into my part of the building). It worked pretty well.
Because my wife wants NFL ticket, I had to also subscribe to YouTubeTV. I was thinking of dumping my DirecTV subscription and just using FireTV dongles on all my TV's in the house. So I did a week without using DirecTV, just Firesticks, OTA for local, and YouTubeTV for the cable news channels, Smithsonian channel, etc. You'll find your own unique frustrations but what I discovered was:
1. Trying to navigate around channels on Firestick is frustrating as Hell. Everything is alphabetical, and you can't just jump to a channel by direct navigation. Especially true if you move into the 'Freebee' network channels too, where you'll find useless channels like the "Alf Channel". No, I'm not kidding. It's like a house of mirrors to navigate, and the Alexa voice feature rarely gets you where you want to go.
2. You'll need to go into the Firestick maintenance settings and regularly purge 'bloatware' and other things they install like shopping, music channels, and other things you'll never use. If you don't clean out the memory and delete bloatware, you might experience annoying buffering or the inability to reach certain streams.
3. One many of the 'freebie channels' break into programs with ads with no warning or not at a logical spot. It runs a lot like YouTube videos without use of a ad blocker. The ads are usually much louder in volume than what you're watching, so it can be a shock when ads start running.
In the end I've still got DirecTV, but I haven't given up on the streaming transition yet. I've been gradually trying to get used to the clunkiness of FireTV and streaming exclusively. Switching to OTA is pretty easy and reliable.
Can you back up a moment? Are you saying there are ad blockers for eliminating those incredibly obnoxious mid-stream ad inserts that Youtube does without warning? If I'm not misinterpreting you, please spill the beans. (Because driving up I-280 to YT headquarters with a missile launcher strapped to the Prius probably wouldn't win me any "Good Citizen" awards from the local CHP office.)
National Broadband Plan
The National Broadband Plan, released by the FCC on March 17, 2010, sets out a roadmap for initiatives to stimulate economic growth, spur job creation and boost America's capabilities in education, health care, homeland security and more.
AFAIK, this issue hasn't entered this discussion, with ever improving video codecs, HDTV can probably be provided to even the most rural (USA) Internet users.
National broadband (service) seems to negate the need for TV Networks+Affiliates, just stream the content on the Internet.
Kirk Bayne
Uh, hey Kirk, all the streaming codecs are already HDR, and some are even 4K.National Broadband Plan
The National Broadband Plan, released by the FCC on March 17, 2010, sets out a roadmap for initiatives to stimulate economic growth, spur job creation and boost America's capabilities in education, health care, homeland security and more.www.fcc.gov
AFAIK, this issue hasn't entered this discussion, with ever improving video codecs, HDTV can probably be provided to even the most rural (USA) Internet users.
National broadband (service) seems to negate the need for TV Networks+Affiliates, just stream the content on the Internet.
Kirk Bayne
What quality of the stream depends on the available bandwidth at the user end.
I still have cable because of my job. When I retire, it probably goes away.
Apart from breaking news, the only thing we tend to watch live from cable is Rachael Maddow on MSNBC. We DVR SNL, 60 Minutes, Stephen Colbert and Seth Myers for playback the next day, which means we could probably just as easily stream them.
Beyond that, for comedies, dramas and movies, it's all streaming. We have a four-year old Samsung TV that has app capability for the major streamers, so we don't need Fire or any add-on. I was subscribing to pretty much all of them for a while but have settled into having subscriptions for what we're actively watching and then re-activating dormant subscriptions when a favorite show starts a new season, so right now it's Amazon Prime, Max and AppleTV+.
Interesting that you mentioned DuMont, because there is a sequel to that network. After the network shut down, their former O&Os became the Metromedia stations that were sold to NewsCorp in the mid-80s and became the nucleus of the Fox O&Os. So it turns out that there is a link between DuMont and Fox through those stations.
I'm thinking that (USA) National Broadband is a good bypass of the Networks, I guess the question is how fast will content creators realize that they don't need the overhead (all sorts of approvals) and headaches (can you make you new show more like the hit show on another TV network?) of dealing with the big TV Networks and can distribute their content themselves.
When the content creators cross this Rubicon, I think nobody will be interested in buying (even part of) the current TV Networks.
Kirk Bayne
When the content creators cross this Rubicon, I think nobody will be interested in buying (even part of) the current TV Networks.
Kirk Bayne
How long before the subscription services stop allowing people to add and drop service at will, instead locking them into longterm contracts like cable? The whole streaming industry is already worse than cable right now with the pace of endless price hikes.
The difference is there isn't any infrastructure for streaming. Cable companies have thousands of miles of cable and fiber and satellite companies have expensive satellites. They even 'rent' you that cable box, or receiver.
The price hikes are really a couple of different things.
Every one of the new wave of streamers---Max, Disney+, AppleTV+, Paramount+, Peacock (I'm probably leaving someone out here) started with loss-leader pricing to build scale. The new kids wanted to be instantly competitive in terms of subscribers with Netflix and Hulu so they made it cheap.
Now, three to five years in for the newbies, they've lost a chunk of change and they need to get real about their pricing.
They have also discovered that the most profitable approach is to have a lower-priced tier that's ad-supported (getting money from both the viewer and the advertiser).
But they can't just advertise "Now with commercials!", so they're keeping their ad-free tiers and raising that subscription rate to nudge the largest possible number of people into the less expensive ad-supported tier.
Some of us (myself included) have gotten very used to shows that are built like movies---no breaks in concentration, no artificial act break four times an hour to get four minutes worth of commercials in (so far, ad-supported streaming breaks are shorter and fewer).
But even I am finding that it really depends on the show. Commercial breaks in "The Crown"? "Succession?" Unthinkable. "Bosch: Legacy"? "The Lincoln Lawyer?" Those really feel more like network TV shows (with profanity standards relaxed) anyway.
So, it'll be a mix for me.
Another notgonnahappen, Kirk.
Yeah, you can produce it yourself. You can even distribute it yourself. But unless you have massive resources for promotion, nobody's gonna see it.
But as cable companies lose revenue from traditional cable subscriptions (which helps pay for their cable & fiber infrastructure) will they raise prices on internet service to help make up some of these lost profits?
They might, but the market for internet service is pretty competitive. I have three companies trying to get my business. Cable companies are competing with phone companies, and then you have Google Fiber. So that competition will hopefully keep prices down. I notice cable companies like to continue the hardware rental business to internet by offering their own wifi/modem. But you can buy a compatible box at a fairly good price.
I just had AT&T put a fiber optic line into my house last week to replace the now-ancient ADSL circuit I've had for the last decade. The old one gave me 22 Mbps downstream and 2 Mb upstream. The new fiber line has almost a full gigabit upstream and downstream. The cost for the old line was $72 a month (though that also included VOIP telephony, which accounted for about $16/month of that $72, between telephony taxes and equipment rental fees), and the new circuit is $55/mo. No installation charge, no data caps, no monthly equipment charges. Obviously AT&T wants to build market share, but that's a better deal than they routinely offer for 300 Mb service, so why would I want to get back into bed with Comcast Xfinity?
One of the absolute pleasures of my move to Denver was getting to fire Comcast and its constant rate increases and inept and clumsy customer service. What has replaced it? Fiber to the distribution point from the local telco (apparently an Australian technology developed for their national broadband network) that gives up 1 gig up and down for $70 per month with the modem and wi-fi thrown in for free. I didn't need the latter since I already had my own router, but the telco's wi-fi supports Wi-Fi 6, which I didn't have before. Everything is totally configurable and the connection is amazingly stable. Right now, TV is just over the air. We'll probably add streaming and maybe something like YouTube TV eventually but we're not in a rush. I tried getting a DVR for OTA from a company called Aluratek, but I've had lots of problems with it and the box is out of circuit at the moment. The TV's own tuner is OK. Monthly cost savings are around $200. No more sports networks that I don't watch anyway; no more city taxes that get wasted anyway (I'm looking at you, Oakland).
No landline here - the house, which was remodeled and added onto last year, does not have wiring for a landline and we've been using our cellphones for everything for the last decade. So that's another $55/month saved (and that was on measured service!).
Is it any wonder cable customers are cutting the cord? The cable companies got greedy, people noticed, alternatives became available, and watch the downward spiral accelerate.
It's not only that, but this whole thing we call "linear TV" is starting to fade. That's making all of these single topic cable channels obsolete. People have their DVR, and make their own watch list, the way they make their own playlists with music. When I look at the list of channels, I realize I don't watch as many as I used to.
The irony of our current setup is that, at the moment, it's probably "more linear" than what we had in California, since we're relying on over-the-air TV with no DVR (due to problems with that Aluratek box I mentioned; that $70 purchase may end up being a wasted expenditure as I am very frustrated with it). I would like to get away from that but other issues have been top of mind, so the TV setup is mostly on the back burner until other things are resolved.
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